As the Republican Congress plots to cripple Planned Parenthood and the right to choose hinges on one vacant Supreme Court seat, American Martyrs probes all the wounds of our abortion debate. Indeed, it’s the most relevant book of Oates’s half-century-long career, a powerful reminder that fiction can be as timely as this morning’s tweets but infinitely more illuminating. For as often as we hear that some novel about a wealthy New Yorker suffering ennui is a story about 'how we live now,' here is a novel that actually fulfills that promise, a story whose grasp is so wide and whose empathy is so boundless that it provides an ultrasound of the contemporary American soul ... They are American families so separated by opportunity and ideology that they could be living in different countries, but Oates’s sympathetic attention to the dimensions of their lives renders both with moving clarity ... Oates has mastered an extraordinary form commensurate to her story’s breadth. The book is written in a structure fluid enough to move back and forth in time, to shift from first to third person without warning, sometimes breaking into italics as though this febrile text couldn’t contain the fervency of these words ... To enter this masterpiece is to be captivated by the paradox of that tragic courage and to become invested in Oates’s search for some semblance of atonement, secular or divine.

A Book of American Martyrs manages to cover several of our greatest hits of political controversy: not only abortion but also capital punishment, terrorism, religion, the 1st Amendment, the 2nd Amendment. Whatever your poison, this book will have something to get your blood roiling ... Oates, at least, is there for these fictional children. A Book of American Martyrs belongs to them — Naomi and Luther’s older daughter Dawn in particular — following their lives as they reckon with the assassination and its consequences over the next 12 years. These are the daughters of men fighting over women’s rights, left behind by their fathers. It seems just that they get a voice ... A Book of American Martyrs is successful because she refuses to satirize or dehumanize anyone, even murderous foes of abortion. She spends more than 100 pages in Luther’s voice, and repugnant as he is, he has the full weight of a rich, complicated character, totally seen and understood by his author. That same immersive empathy extends to all the major characters, with wonderful results ... This is a hard book to get through, even discounting its length; it’s painful and demanding and sometimes nihilistic, not exactly chicken soup for the ailing American soul. But with its wrath and violence, A Book of American Martyrs offers this teaspoon of warmth in these troubled times: that it is possible to be wrong without surrendering your humanity.

America’s abortion war contains treacherous depths, and to Oates’s credit her book seeks to plumb them. How, it asks, might we humanize extreme ideological positions? How might we subvert the divisiveness that so troubles the debate? ... The shifting kaleidoscope of voices is at once illuminating and dizzying. Oates may be betting the multitude of perspectives will help us see around our blinders and prejudices about the Other. The question is, who is the Other, and according to whom? In some respects, Oates’s bet pays off ... Oates’s observations about Dawn’s psychic relationship to other women and her rumination on female masculinity and athleticism are so dazzling they warrant their own novel ... Yet the novel affords such breadth and discernment only to the educated, middle-class Voorhees clan. Despite their suffering, the Voorheeses are intelligent, thoughtful people with some degree of agency. At the opposite end of the class (and ideological) divide, the Dunphys’ grim lives are defined almost exclusively by lack, victimhood and ignorance. The novel seems to dislike these people intensely, and characterizes them accordingly.

The provocative portrait of two families on opposite sides of America's abortion debate is befitting the times in more ways than one ... Oates' American saga captivates because it exists within an actual drama playing out across the country. Morality has never felt less fixed, the martyr never more subjective. Oates’ prose is imbued with tumbling sentences and wandering constructions, a style that naturally fits with the narrative's ethical entanglements ... Martyrs is a graceful and excruciating story of two families who do not live very far apart, but exist in different realities. The tragedy is not the gruesome death of Gus Voorhees, but the ease with which the families brand one another as enemies. The saga ends neatly, which may seem incompatible with the moral ambiguity of the previous 700 pages, but it appears, to this reader at least, a gesture of kindness. Hope amid horror.

Oates’s oeuvre includes gang rapists, serial killers, and even the devil in disguise, but Luther Dunphy may be her most disturbing character—not because of the militancy of his beliefs, but because of how intimately we come to inhabit his consciousness...It is frightening to be so far inside this way of thinking, to know how deeply wrong it is, and yet, at the same time, to sympathize ... For most of the novel Oates’s prose is clipped, with many one-sentence paragraphs that speed the momentum of the text, but in her description of Luther’s agonized death her language takes lyrical flight ... Like much of Oates’s other recent work, it is clearly an attempt to speak for 'those unable to speak for themselves'—the uneducated white working class. In the presence of the Dunphys and their distinctive religious and family culture, this novel is most alive, especially in its portrayal of Dawn ... Oates is sometimes spoken of as a novelist of sensationalism, her Gothic and morbid tendencies emphasized. In fact, A Book of American Martyrs is a deeply political novel, all the more powerful for its many ambiguities. With its depiction of these families caught literally in the crosshairs of the anti-abortion movement, this novel may well shock and offend readers. But it fearlessly exposes not only an element of American society rarely seen in literature, but also the hypocrisies of those who would pass judgment on it.

Shattering from start to finish, this is a 768-page discourse on abortion in America that perhaps couldn’t have been published at a more pivotal time. It is also so evenly informed, and balanced, that it presents no discernible point of view ... A Book of American Martyrs is grim going – but the writing is gripping and the subject is apt for Oates, an author consistently drawn to the deep, and the paradoxical ... Oates is a longtime boxing aficionado – and her depiction of 'D.D. Dunphy' in the ring is both brilliant and devastating, words that also describe A Book of American Martyrs. As a novel, I should qualify, this is an overlong book weighted down by extraneous characters. But, for followers of the Lockport-born Oates (and I have long been one), nothing she writes is too much. Nor is any subject taboo. In A Book of American Martyrs, she considers abortion, one of the most incendiary issues of our times, without flinching or taking a side – and this, in itself, is a miracle.

...[a] fierce, provocative, and often maddening novel ... In Martyrs‘ best passages, she is mesmerizing—unleashing feverish streams of prose in great, incantatory swoons and laying her subjects bare without judgment or pity. But her enduring stylistic tics—the circular echoes and repetitions, the heavy italics for emphasis, the often 'arbitrary' scattering of 'quotation marks'—also begin to wear after nearly 750 dense, relentless pages ... One of Oates’ greatest gifts is her ability to extract universal truths and resonance from even the thorniest subjects. So when the book’s final paragraphs offer sudden, sunny resolution, it feels not just incongruous but strangely unsatisfying: a firebomb diffused in a wisp of smoke.

To describe Joyce Carol Oates’ latest novel as anything short of epic feels disingenuous, and yet it still falls short of capturing A Book of American Martyrs’ gravity. The narrative explores both sides of the national debate surrounding access to abortion, exposing the violence that may erupt when devotees of both causes meet. It’s also a testament to how fervor for a cause can inspire such devotion that families are destroyed ... Oates is at once critical and empathic, eschewing simple black and white moral arguments for a nuanced examination of martyrdom. Voorhees and Dunphy both become symbols for their respective causes, but by doing so they allow their families to be martyred by public scrutiny. The families’ broken lives and attempts to reclaim their respective identities are heartbreaking.

Oates shows us radicalization as something of a relief for a man uncertain about his place in a changing America and secretly bored with his proscribed role as father/husband/family leader...Oates stirs empathy for Luther and his family, never lampooning their earnest beliefs. The prose in Luther’s chapters bear the stamp of his mind: The vocabulary is blunt and limited, the descriptions repetitive, the phrasing stiff and often passive, as if the world acts upon him ... Some of Oates’ detours are wearying: Her plot demands that two separate women, both public intellectuals, essentially abandon their children, and neither case is developed enough to be convincing. But most prove fruitful ... Oates is never more persuasive or powerful than when steeping us in the lives of young women alienated from their families, their communities, their bodies. The prose grows richer, more deliberative when written from their perspectives.